How can I find the internal links on my website?

Short answer

Search Console’s Links report shows your most linked pages for free. A crawler gives you every internal link on the site, with source, destination and anchor text. Your browser can show the links on a single page. The list is the easy part. What matters is reading it for orphans, starved money pages and anchors that say nothing.

Finding your internal links takes minutes. Understanding what they are telling you takes longer, and that is where most of the value is. Here are the three ways I use, from quickest to most thorough, and then what to look for.

1. Search Console’s Links report

In Search Console, open Links from the left-hand menu. Under “Internal links” you will see your pages sorted by how many internal links point at them. Click any page to see which pages link to it.

This is free and it is Google’s own view. It is also limited: it shows a sample rather than every link, and it does not show anchor text. Use it for a quick sense of which pages your site treats as most important. If your blog’s category archives sit above your main service pages, you have found your first problem.

2. A crawler

A desktop crawler such as Screaming Frog or Sitebulb walks your site like a search engine and records every link it finds: source page, destination, anchor text, and whether the link sits in navigation, the footer or the body. Most have a free tier that covers small sites.

Crawl the whole site, starting from the homepage.
Export the internal links. One row per link: from, to, anchor, position on the page.
Count inlinks per page. The crawler usually does this for you.
Check click depth. How many clicks each page sits from the homepage.
Compare with your sitemap. Any URL in the sitemap that the crawl did not reach is an orphan.

This is the method I use for every internal linking project. It gives you the full picture and lets you filter out menu and footer links, so you can see the contextual links on their own.

3. Your browser, for a single page

To see the links on one page, right-click and inspect, or use a browser extension that lists all links. Useful for a spot check. Not practical for more than a few pages.

While you are there, check that the links are real links. Google’s guidance is that it can generally only crawl links that are an anchor element with an href attribute. Menus and buttons built with click handlers may work for people and not for Google.

What to look for once you have the list

Orphan pages. Pages with no internal links pointing at them. On one marketplace I audited, 8,317 of 9,220 indexed pages could not be reached by clicking through the site. I wrote it up as a site where ninety per cent was unreachable.

Starved money pages. Sort by inlinks. Find your service pages, categories or location pages. If they sit near the bottom while blog archives and tag pages sit near the top, your site is pointing its strength in the wrong direction.

Contextual versus navigational. Filter out header and footer links. How many contextual links does each important page receive? On most sites, very few.

Weak anchors. Filter the anchor text column for “read more”, “click here”, “learn more”, “this post”. Each one is a wasted chance to describe the destination.

Links through redirects. Internal links pointing at URLs that redirect. Usually old header and footer links left over from a URL change, firing a redirect on every page view.

Deep pages. Important pages more than three or four clicks from the homepage.

How the numbers compare

For a rough benchmark, the HTTP Archive found the median page carries 41 internal links, and 129 on the top 1,000 sites. Most of those are navigation. The number that matters is how many point at the pages you want to rank, and from where.

Turning the findings into action

Make a short list: your ten most important pages, how many contextual links each receives now, and five candidate pages that could link to each one from a relevant sentence. That list is a placement plan, and working through it is usually the most productive SEO afternoon a small team can have.

Use Search Console to choose the anchors

Once you know which pages need links, Search Console tells you what to call them. Open the performance report, filter to the target page, and look at the queries it already earns impressions for. Those are the words Google already associates with it. Use them, varied naturally, as anchor text in the new links. It is the difference between a link that says “our services” and one that says “local SEO for multi-location businesses”, and the second one carries far more meaning to both readers and Google. On larger sites this mapping is most of the work, and it is the part almost nobody does.

If you would rather have the whole map and the placement plan done for you, my internal linking service delivers both, with anchors chosen from the queries your pages already earn impressions for.